Welcome!
Exploring Michigan’s Ecosystems, Past and Present
Presented as an alternative to a PowerPoint presentation, we (Myles Walimaa and Randy Swaty ) hope to orient you to Michigan’s ecosystems as they were just prior to European Colonization and as of ~2020. This can certainly be built upon and these workflows may be used for any area of interest. The State of Michigan is the target area for this dashboard, since it is where both Randy and I have lived for years.
Randy is an ecologist for The Nature Conservancy and I am a former National Park Service employee. We both work with the Conservation Data Lab to mentor students in the art of computer coding and data visualization, particularly for conservation purposes.
For all charts:
The acreages were calculated based on the quantity of 900m2 pixels (30m x 30m), which was converted to acres.
Use your mouse to zoom in on smaller areas by drawing a box.
You can reset the zoom by clicking the “house” icon at the top left of the chart.
PLEASE read the disclaimers on each slide explaining the assumptions with each dataset. This is meant for exploratory purposes only.
The Past
Observations and the dataset
Historically, Michigan was dominated by hardwood-dominated ecosystems, with a substantial showing of wetland (refered to as “riparian” in the source data set) conifer and mixed hardwood-conifer types.
This map was created using LANDFIRE’s Biophysical Settings. As there was no satellite imagery 300 years ago, this is a model of what the historical ecosystems looked like based soil types, climate, elevation, ecological succession, among many other datasets. The original data displayed plots of 30m x 30m squares that we call “pixels”, and Michigan has over 500 million of them!
This is what we think the distribution of ecosystems looked like prior to European settlement. The caretakers of this land at the time were the indigenous natives who called the Great Lakes their home. They recognized the value of fire for regeneration and resiliency, often performing “prescribed” burns to keep their home strong and healthy.
Explore this map created by Native Land Digital to learn more about which tribes were located where. Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass provides valuable insight on the traditional ways the natives connected with the land, largely through combining ancient philosophy and modern science.
DISCLAIMER:
This was intentionally non-interactive simply to give you a broad visual of what things probably looked like.
‘Riparian’ types include all wetlands.
Download map of coarse historical ecosystems here
Present
Observations and the dataset
This chart was created using LANDFIRE’s Existing Vegetation Type. This uses satellite imagery, ground assessment, and other methods to describe current “ecosystems” (or lack thereof). The main pattern to note is the substantial amount of agricultural types on the landscape today.
- Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) has a “fine” scale classification called “EVT_NAME” and a “coarse” scale classification called “EVT_PHYS”. The map and the chart are based on “EVT_PHYS”
Does anything jump out to you as surprising?
What do you notice about the historical and current ratios of conifers-to-hardwoods?
DISCLAIMER:
Again, this is not a perfect representation of today’s conditions and is meant for scales of several thousand+ acres. If you want to explore the EVT dataset further, you can find information here and can read about its development. There is a nifty handbook that discusses each ecosystem classification in a fair amount of depth, so you may get a better idea of what you may find there.
I grouped all the developed sub-categories into a single “Developed” classification.
Download a map of the coarse present ecosystems here
Exploring Change
DISCLAIMER: The assumptions made in this chart are that if the ecosystems are no longer following the trajectory of natural ecological succession, then they have been converted into something unnatural. This chart does not consider ecosystems changing from one to another as that may happen naturally, only change into non-native, mineland, agriculture, development, or the like.
You can see which of the ecosystems remained relatively untouched, as well as the ones that were heavily affected.
The acreages were calculated based on the quantity of 900m2 pixels (30m x 30m), which was converted to acres.
When you hover, you can see how many acres of each ecosystem changed (roughly).
Use your mouse to zoom in on smaller areas by drawing a box.
You can reset the zoom by clicking the “house” icon at the top left of the chart.
Which ecosystems remain mostly the same? Is this surprising?
Where did most of the agricultural land come from? Do you notice any trends?
Are there any ecosystems that might be close to disappearing completely?
Coarse Look at Conversion
DISCLAIMER:
Unfortunately, this is not an “apples to apples” comparison.
The datasets used were BioPhysical Settings (historical model) and
Existing Vegetation Type (current satellite imagery, ground assessment,
other methods). Additionally, the Existing Vegetation Type is not a
perfect representation of the ground because there can be multiple
ecosystems found in 900 m2 (remember 30m x 30m pixels).
This chart provides a general idea of how Michigan land has changed on a coarse scale.
BPS and EVT were stacked on top of each other, and we extracted the coarse categories from those datasets.
The left side shows coarse landcover from the past (BPS), and the right shows current landcover (EVT).
The grey bands represent transitions from one to another.
When you hover, the number value is in acres (approx).
Does anything surprise you about how things have changed?
Which ecosystems had the least amount of conversion? What about the most?
Why did so little Agricultural land come from Coniferous ecosystems?
Fine Look at Conversion
DISCLAIMER:
Unfortunately, this is not an “apples to apples” comparison.
The datasets used were BioPhysical Settings (historical model) and
Existing Vegetation Type (current satellite imagery, ground assessment,
other methods). Additionally, the Existing Vegetation Type is not a
perfect representation of the ground because there can be multiple
ecosystems found in 900 m2 (remember 30m x 30m pixels).
For those of you who want to explore this conversion further, search no more!
BPS and EVT were overlaid on top of each other the attributes of each pixel were extracted.
The left side shows the historical BPS ecosystem, and the right side shows the current EVT ecosystem.
The acre value shows how many acres converted from that BPS type to the EVT type.
There are over 2000 comparisons over 152 pages.
The acreages were calculated based on the quantity of 900m2 pixels (30m x 30m), which was converted to acres.
You can sort columns by ascending or descending order, as well as filter results or search for something specific.
For example, 429,625 acres of North-Central Oak Barrens are now Eastern Cool Temperate Row Crop. Well, roughly.
Again, this is not a perfect comparison and is only intended on giving you a general idea of what’s going on.
ENJOY AND HAVE FUN!!
Learn More
Sources, LF documentation, ideas, idk some useful stuff to keep pushing these people to research stuff